Sergeant Tish's face flushed. "See here, I'm not going to have any newspaper scribbler talk that way to me! If I'd have let you have your way, you'd have made a fool out of me as well as yourself. Hairpins, tallow! Bah! I guess you think you are a detective--a real detective. That's the way with you newspaper guys--always hunting for a chance to make the police wrong, trying to make monkeys of the police department. You make me sick!" Wiggly's ears moved violently. "You wait and see!" he retorted. "Sneer at hairpins and tallow, but I know I'm on the right trail, and I'm going to stick on this job until I've followed it to the end." CHAPTER XXVII WIGGLY REMAINS UNCONVINCED For all of his asserted confidence, which bordered upon boasting, Wiggly Price realized that he had a hard nut to crack. Swinging out of the library and Sergeant Tish's presence, he went out to the porch and sat down to indulge himself in logic, speculation, guessing. He took the piece of tallow from his pocket again, staring at it fixedly; his belief that it had some vital part in the mystery had become an obsession; but there was one thing about it that discouraged him--Joan Sheridan had shown no perturbation when he had produced it before her eyes. Following a simple bit of logical reasoning, if the bit of tallow were so important as he insistently imagined, and if the girl had done the shooting, it was extremely strange that she had shown no signs of agitation when faced with this evidence. He had been favorably impressed with the girl's face; she seemed to be a sane, well-balanced young person. Certainly, he argued, it was difficult to believe that she would have committed the murder after cold premeditation; but might she not have yielded to a suddenly and insanely jealous impulse, suddenly overwhelmed by the proximity of the automatic pistol? No matter who did the murder, Wiggly reasoned, it had not been a premeditated crime; the slayer had not gone to Helen Gilmore's room with a weapon. The weapon was already there. These cogitations, of course, took it for granted that Haskins' dying statement had been entirely truthful; the reporter might have agreed with Tish that the whole yarn was a lie, except that he could not imagine a desperate man like Haskins deliberately leaving the gun behind. With the death of the only person who knew of his presence in the house, Haskins had nothing to gain by cloaking the crime under the guise of suicide. That Joan Sheridan knew more than she had told, Wiggly was flatly certain; he had studied every changing expression of her face and he had seen the emotions which Tish had missed. Either she had committed the crime, or else she knew who did.